Loving the Process, Questioning the Product: What's Your Art Telling You?

IN THIS POST:

• The tension between process and product
• The emergence of unexpected elements in your work
• The struggle with authenticity and personal growth through art

Today I am thinking about honesty in process and product.

I am thinking of an artist who did a demo and started out with loose scrawled words and bright colors and then buried it all in heavy layers of neutral paint and the final piece was in his signature style. He did not believe in happy accidents, he did not believe in following the muse. For him that was all a distraction from exploring his visual voice and set of limitations.

I was baffled by his approach - he negated everything I love in my own process.

But I saw his point. And I see how there is a certain symbolism in burying the aliveness of you in what you allow yourself to be in the world. He is gay, and I know the painting was referencing a tragic gay poet. 

So, that is many layers of honesty. There is the honesty of being alive and free in who you are, and the real experience of living in a world that has a long history of bigotry and violence.

I love to create images that contain beauty but are not only beautiful. I am compelled to add in awkward distorted figures. The figures are not conventionally beautiful but I have complete affection for them. It is much easier to have affection for them when they are anthropomorphized animals. But lately it has been crones and hags.

The other day I posted a declaration that “Maybe I don't get to decide what my art is. I only get/have to make it. Maybe it's as big a mystery to me as it is to everybody else.”

I think about this when something emerges in my work that I am not sure I like. There is not liking something because it lacks skill, and there is not liking something because it disrupts you. The piece that accompanies this post is disrupting me. 

It is not my usual style
It has a very masculine energy
It feels powerful
It feels kind of Native American and makes me think of cheap tourist art.

It is why I kept the shape of the head, to communicate that all is not well here. 
Do I get to change it? Should I not show it?

[It has other issues, like the collage pieces not being integrated with the drawing. I haven’t quite figured that out yet.]

The feathers are meant to reference wings, an ignorant useless attempt to be something other than what you are.

But I feel haunted by the figure. I feel haunted by the feeling of it being a warrior, an archetypal energy I’ve never really explored or embodied. 

What if there is a mismatch between being honest in your PROCESS and being honest about what you want to create as a final PRODUCT? Because I loved the process of making this. And here it is!

Yeah, yeah, I know all of the arguments for choosing process over product. What if your process results in something you hate?

Thinking about these images here, and the things I was thinking about when I was depressed, and that this is the result of that processing, I see awkward growth towards strength. I am intimidated and mystified by warrior energy - why did that come through? 

No!

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